In many business processes, the “value added chain” includes the transportation of goods. Typically, it is effected by transportation providers for an ordering party.
The processing of the freight costs, which is usually carried out by the ordering party or a freight-cost-management service provider acting for the ordering party, goes through different stages. First, the transportation provider, after having carried out a transportation order, typically sends a shipment notification to the ordering party which confirms that the ordered shipment has been carried out. Later, the transportation provider sends an invoice for the shipment to the ordering party, where sometimes several shipments are listed as invoice items in a single invoice. Typically, the ordering party then verifies that the invoice amount is justified in an auditing procedure, approves the invoice, books the invoice in its bookkeeping system and, finally, pays the invoice.
Typically, as soon as the invoice is booked, the freight costs caused by the transportation service provided are automatically entered into the ordering party's balance. However, there may be a considerable time interval between the shipment and the booking of the corresponding invoice. In order to have detailed knowledge of an enterprise's economic situation it is also desirable to take into account the incurred, but not yet booked freight costs in a contemporary manner. Incurred costs that have not yet been booked, and which have accumulated over a certain period of time, are called “accruals”. In at least some jurisdictions, it is mandatory to take the accruals into account in the ordering party's balance.
In businesses in which the incurred freight costs fluctuate considerably from month to month and year to year, it would be seriously imprecise to use average amounts as accruals. In order to obtain a more precise estimate of the accruals the transportation providers are usually required to provide a pre-advice of the individual expected freight cost, e.g. together with the shipment notice, or to provide accumulated estimated freight costs in short time periods (e.g. daily).
However, the accuracy of the accruals amount then depends on the reliability of the transportation provider's pre-advice. Furthermore, since the transportation provider is typically not aware of what was actually transported, he cannot provide pre-advice of the incurred freight costs split up into the ordering party's different cost units (e.g. product lines) which would enable the ordering party to allocate the incurred freight costs to the different cost units.
Systems for automatically determining freight costs and producing freight bills are, for example, known from U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,571,149 B1 and 5,222,018. U.S. Pat. No. 6,219,653 B1 discloses a freight calculation platform which enables users to forecast freight costs in order to facilitate negotiations and agreements between transportation providers and ordering parties, before the transportation services are actually provided. U.S. Pat. No. 5,063,506 discloses a cost estimation system for estimating the cost of supplying parts to a manufacturing facility, which includes the freight cost.